#227: The Most Common Forms of Self-Sabotage After a Break-Up
Breakups are painful. That’s obvious. But what’s less obvious—and something I see all the time in my work—is how easily that pain can turn into prolonged suffering when we fall into certain patterns after a relationship ends.
If you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll know that I believe breakups can be a powerful opportunity for growth. I know that might sound wildly incongruent with your lived experience right now. Breakups hurt. They destabilise us. They crack us open.
And yet—they also shine a very bright light on our attachment wounds, our coping strategies, and the places where our work really lives.
For people with anxious attachment patterns in particular, breakups can feel excruciating. Letting go of someone you love goes against everything your nervous system is wired to do. Your whole system screams hold on tighter, don’t let go, fix this at all costs.
So today, I want to walk you through five common ways people unknowingly keep themselves stuck after a breakup—and what to do instead—so you can use this moment as a turning point rather than a repeat of old patterns.
1. Obsessively Replaying the Relationship
Replaying every conversation. Re-reading text messages. Analysing what changed. What you said. What you didn’t say. Asking friends—or ChatGPT—for a forensic breakdown of what went wrong.
This is incredibly common, especially for anxiously attached people. It’s a form of relational hyper-focus: if you can just figure it out, surely you’ll feel better.
But here’s the hard truth: this kind of rumination doesn’t actually bring relief. It keeps you tethered to the relationship and avoids the pain rather than helping you process it.
Your nervous system is trying to regulate anxiety by “solving the puzzle,” but grief isn’t something you can problem-solve your way out of. The pain doesn’t disappear—it just gets buried under mental busywork.
When you notice yourself looping, don’t shame yourself. Gently interrupt the pattern. Put guardrails around your mind. Redirect your energy into something that helps your body process the emotion—movement, breath, expression, rest—rather than endlessly analysing what might have been.
2. Believing You Can’t Move On Without Closure
“I just need one more conversation.”
“I just need them to explain why.”
“I can’t move on until it makes sense.”
This belief is incredibly seductive—and incredibly limiting.
The person who left you needing closure is often the very person who doesn’t have the clarity, self-awareness, or emotional capacity to give you the answers you’re hoping for. You may be vastly overestimating their ability to provide a neat, satisfying explanation.
More often than not, the need for closure is actually about wanting reassurance that counters our worst fears:
I wasn’t unlovable.
I wasn’t too much.
I wasn’t the problem.
But outsourcing that reassurance to someone else keeps your power outside of you.
Real closure often comes from accepting that the ending was unsatisfying, incomplete, and messy—and choosing to close the book anyway, unfinished sentences and all.
3. Idealising the Relationship in Hindsight
After a breakup, the tension lifts. The conflict stops. The day-to-day stress disappears.
What’s left? The good memories. The connection. The routines. The things you’ll miss.
This makes it very easy to romanticise the relationship and forget how anxious, lonely, or unseen you may have felt while you were in it.
That doesn’t mean the relationship was all bad. Very few are. Grief includes mourning the genuinely beautiful parts—the shared jokes, the future hopes, the moments of closeness.
But if you notice yourself telling a one-sided story, gently reality-check it. Zoom out. Remember the whole picture, not just the highlights reel. Relationships don’t usually end for no reason—and often, they last longer than they should have.
4. Comparing Your Healing to Theirs
This one is a trap. Full stop.
People with different attachment styles process breakups very differently. If you’re anxious and your ex is avoidant, your timelines and behaviours are not going to look the same—and expecting them to will only hurt you.
On top of that, you don’t actually know how they’re doing. Social media, second-hand updates, or surface-level conversations are not a window into someone’s internal world.
Comparing yourself will almost always fuel painful stories:
They didn’t care.
They’ve moved on.
What does it say about me that I’m still struggling?
Breakups are not a competition. Keep your eyes on your own paper. Your work now is about you—your healing, your needs, your next chapter.
5. Leaning on Each Other for Emotional Support
This one is particularly tricky, especially when the breakup was amicable or ambiguous.
Continuing to be each other’s emotional support keeps your attachment system stuck. Even if you know the relationship is over, your nervous system doesn’t fully register that reality if the bond is still being activated in moments of vulnerability.
If you’re supporting them—or letting them support you—it delays detachment and prolongs the pain. It might bring short-term relief, but it makes long-term healing harder.
This doesn’t require cruelty or coldness. It requires boundaries. Care and distance can coexist.
Your first responsibility after a breakup is supporting yourself—with friends, therapists, and safe, separate support systems—not maintaining emotional intimacy with the person you’re trying to let go of.
Turning Pain Into Healing
If you’re going through a breakup, I’m sending you a lot of love. This is hard. And if you have anxious attachment patterns, it can feel utterly overwhelming.
So much of post-breakup suffering comes from trying to control, analyse, compare, or bypass the pain rather than tending to it. We stay in our heads, buzzing around the puzzle, instead of sitting with the grief underneath it all.
And that grief isn’t just about losing the relationship—it’s about lost hopes, lost versions of the future, and often, lost parts of yourself.
The more your attention stays fixed on them, the further you move away from the part of you that needs care the most.
Turn towards yourself. That’s where the healing lives.
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[00:00:30]:
Welcome back to another episode of On Attachment. In today's episode, we are talking all about breakups and five ways that you might be unknowingly self sabotaging after a breakup. So if you've been around here a while, you would know that I am of the view that breakups can be a really beautiful opportunity. And I know that that sounds a little incongruent with a lot of people's experience of breakups, which is that they are the worst and of course they are really painful a lot of the time, but they also point us towards our wounds and where our work is. And I think that if we take that opportunity and turn towards it and really see them for the mirror that they are, there's incredible growth opportunity there alongside all of the inevitable grief and the hard, messy stuff. But what I encounter all the time, and this is a big part of my work, is helping particularly anxiously attached folks throughout through breakups, which I've talked about recently. Like letting go of someone that you love if you have anxious attachment patterns is excruciating and it goes against everything in your system that says definitely don't let go of someone that you love. But this is a big part of my work.
[00:01:44]:
And so I've listened to many people's stories, I've answered many people's questions, like thousands. And I know where people get stuck and I know the traps that people fall into after a breakup. And so today I'm going to be sharing five ways that you might be unknowingly keeping yourself stuck in the suffering more than is necessary, and what you might do instead to actually put down some of those old patterns, rather than continuing to enact all of your anxious attachment patterns in the breakup as you probably did in the relationship, so that you can actually use the breakup as a catalyst to turn inwards, to focus on yourself and what you're needing and what you're feeling, and to do things differently next time. Because I think ultimately that is what we want, right? That's what we want to be able to do is not just repeat the same old patterns every time. But you know, oftentimes the ways that we cope with pain will lead us straight into our attachment patterns in very pronounced ways. So we do have to be very intentional and deliberate and self aware about the choices we're making after a breakup and how we might course correct to do things in a healthier way. Before we get into today's episode, I just wanted to remind you it's very much in keeping with the theme of today's episode. I have a free breakup training where I talk about all of this stuff in more detail.
[00:03:11]:
I cover the different things to what I'll be covering today, but you know, the most common traps that I see anxiously attached people fall into and specifically what to do instead to avoid that and to accelerate your growth and the healing of the underlying wounds that a breakup may have brought you into contact with. So that free training is much more in depth than I'll be able to go today. So the link to sign up for that is in the show notes. I would love for you to come along and I can assure you that you will leave feeling comforted and less alone and also clearer around what your task is and what this breakup is calling you forward into. So hopefully it's a nice little combo of validation and hard truth pep talk, which is the sweet spot that I always try and get that for you guys. Okay, so let's get into it. Five ways that you might be unknowingly self sabotaging after a breakup. The first one is obsessively replaying the relationship.
[00:04:10]:
Everything that happened, everything that went wrong, every fight, everything you said, everything you didn't say. Maybe you're going back through all of your text messages and trying to figure out what changed, where it all went wrong. Maybe you're asking ChatGPT for advice and for its analysis of your relationship. I can't tell you how common that is. As a side note, now I've had several students of mine who upload all of their screenshots into ChatGPT and ask for AI analysis of what their partner was thinking and feeling and what they should have done. And all of that makes sense. It's not something that we need to be ashamed of. But equally, I think we have to look at what is this really achieving? Is it meeting the need? Is it scratching the itch? Or is it just keeping me swirling around in this obsessive rumination and analysis that is actually probably keeping me tethered to this person? Rather than supporting me to move forward.
[00:05:10]:
And I think that it's such a natural expression of anxiety and particularly with anxious attachment, this relational hyper focus where we're so obsessed with the other person and figuring them out and deciphering them and what are they thinking, feeling, wanting, needing. And if we can just get all of those answers, then we'll feel okay, somehow we'll know what to do. And we can kind of do that retrospectively as well. Like we can't bear the intolerable uncertainty and disconnection that comes with a breakup. So we just go into this really obsessive cerebral place of trying to figure out the puzzle and convincing ourselves that somehow that's going to bring us relief, when really that is just a way of avoiding the pain that we're in. And I think that we have to see that for what it is. The pain isn't going anywhere. We're just doing all of this busy work on top of it so that we don't have to sit with it and we don't have to feel it.
[00:06:07]:
But of course we're going to have to do that sooner or later. And as they say, the only way out is through. We do. If we want to move through that and process that pain, we've got to be with it rather than trying to problem solve it. So if you notice yourself doing that, which I would say most people do, the vast majority of people that I work with will go into that place of trying to analyse and decipher and obsessive rumination loops about what if and what might have happened. Just notice yourself doing it and then gently steer away. It's not something that you're going to be able to switch off because it's something that your nervous system is doing from this place of mobilisation and self protection, but redirecting away from it and consciously choosing to put that guardrail up when you notice your mind going there and doing something healthier, coming up with almost like a replacement behaviour when you notice yourself doing that rumination, supporting your nervous system to process that anxiety in another way, all of that is going to be much more supportive than just continuing to loop around in what might have happened if I had done this instead, or should I have not asked for that, or what if we hadn't had that fight? It's so rare that those granular things were actually of significance in the grand scheme of things. So don't let your anxieties zoom you in and become obsessively fixated on all of these minute things, it tends not to actually work that way or be true.
[00:07:37]:
It's almost like a soothing mechanism, a coping mechanism for our system, but it can really keep us stuck. Okay. Kind of related to that is this whole piece around closure and convincing yourself and believing that you can't move on until they give you an explanation, until they give you new closure, until they explain to you why they did what they did and whether it was because they were afraid and how they were feeling and is it because they really didn't love me or because all of that stuff, it's like we have to close all of the open loops, otherwise we won't be okay. Or otherwise we just can't move on until we have this perfectly reasonable, it all makes sense explanation that we can tie a bow around and be content with. The really hard truth here, and I've done lots of episodes about closure that you can go and listen to. The hard truth is the person who left you needing closure and who left you with all of those open loops probably doesn't even have the answers right. You may be vastly overestimating someone else's self awareness and certainly their willingness to provide explanations for things that are inherently kind of messy and confusing and emotionally dense. So convincing yourself that that is necessarily a block to your moving on, that unless and until this person who broke your heart shows up with an explanation that makes it all make sense, you won't be able to move on or let go.
[00:09:11]:
That's just not true. But that storey is certainly keeping you stuck because it provides you with a justification or almost an excuse to keep holding on to them. Even if it's only kind of unilaterally one sided holding on because you've told yourself and maybe you've told everyone else, I just need to talk to them one more time. I just need to have one more conversation because it doesn't make sense. And I need to know the answer to this question or that question. You don't need that. You want that. And oftentimes we want that.
[00:09:42]:
Because the alternative is us sitting with all of the painful storeys and beliefs that we have about ourselves. The fears of it's just because I wasn't lovable enough, or I wasn't attractive enough, or I was too needy or I was too sensitive or whatever. So it's not only that we want an explanation from them, we want a specific explanation that counters those worst case fears that we're harbouring. But again, that's putting all of our power outside of us and in the hands of someone who frankly is likely to be unable and or unwilling to provide us with the relief that we're seeking. So there is great liberation to be found in just deciding to close the book, even with all of the unfinished sentences and open loops and recognising that sometimes our closure is to be found in acceptance of how unsatisfactory the ending was, rather than in ensuring a clean ending to the storey. The next trap that people fall into is idealising someone and the relationship in hindsight. So skewing heavily towards remembering all of the good times and looking past everything that was really hard and not working in the relationship. Now this makes sense when we consider the fact that after a breakup, all of the things that were hard, that were not working, all of that friction and tension tends to lift, right, because we're not in the thick of negative conflict cycles and communication breakdowns and frustrations and all of the day to day gripes that we might have had or the deep loneliness of feeling like our needs were unmet and all of that.
[00:11:22]:
The hard stuff about the relationship falls away with the breakup. And so what we're left with is a realisation of what we've lost, of the good things that we've lost alongside all of the other things that weren't working. And that can lead us to have a really distorted perception and tell ourselves a distorted storey about what the relationship was really like. And so we can look back on it with really rose coloured classes and start to romanticise it and go, oh, oh, but you know, that weekend we shared in wherever was actually really nice or oh, that means I'm not gonna get to catch up with their sister anymore who I really got along with or who am I gonna watch this TV show with on Wednesday nights or whatever your tradition might have been. Like all of the little things that maybe were great about the relationship, that were maybe really dwarfed by everything that was, you know, not working and unhealthy and dysfunctional. We can have a bit of a one sided view of it in hindsight and kind of romanticise it and feel that sense of loss and longing. And so I think it's important there to like, yes, absolutely, grieve all of those things because part of a relationship ending is recognising that very few relationships are 100% bad. And so endings mean the loss of things that we really did value and needs that were being met and, you know, beautiful memories and things that we had hope around for the future.
[00:12:48]:
But relationships rarely end for no reason and much more often than not, they drag on longer than maybe they should have. And so it's just good to reality cheque that if you notice yourself romanticising your ex or the relationship just going like, is that really true? Am I replaying an honest picture of what it was like? And if not, can I remind myself of how stressful it was? How insecure I felt, how anxious I felt, how much I may have been suffering on a day to day basis in that relationship, how hard it felt rather than solely focusing on the good times or the things that I'll miss that maybe are few and far between. When we zoom out and take in the full picture, okay, the next one is comparing your healing or how you're doing post breakup to them now. This is such a trap and there's so many reasons for why this will keep you stuck and is just profoundly, utterly unhelpful. It's actually something that I go into a lot in my free breakup training. So again, please go and register for that and come along. But for many reasons. 1.
[00:14:01]:
People with different attachment patterns process breakups very differently. So if you're more anxious and your ex was more avoidant, do not expect that you and they are going to go through this process in a way that looks the same because you aren't and you won't. And comparing that is likely to leave you feeling really shitty about yourself and that is not what you need right now. In addition to that, you don't really know how they're doing, right? You only know what you can glean from social media or from what they might be telling you, which is never going to be the full picture. What you might be hearing secondhand from mutual friends, all of that stuff is going to be imperfect information and not really helpful. So again, just recognise that even if it was helpful to compare, that's not a good sort. You don't have full transparency over their internal world and how they're feeling and the ways they might be numbing out or whatever. That's just not something that you really have insight into.
[00:14:59]:
So just don't go there. Just don't do it to yourself. It's not helpful. It's going to keep you stuck, it's going to leave you feeling worse and it's going to feed all of those storeys of they didn't even care about me and why have they moved on so quickly and they seem to be fine and I'm a total mess. What does that mean? I feel pathetic, I feel like a loser. Like you don't need any of that, so don't feed those storeys because it's not comparing apples with apples. And even if it was, you don't have all the information, so just stop it. Breakups are not a competition.
[00:15:30]:
And again, your obsessive focus on them is distracting you from what your work really is, which is focusing on you and how you're doing and what you need and how you can support yourself to take steps towards your next chapter that has nothing to do with your ex. So keep your eyes on your own paper and stop worrying about what they're doing or not doing and whether they've moved on because you just don't know. And even if you did know, it doesn't really matter because it doesn't have anything to do with you. Okay? And last but not least, leaning on them for emotional support or letting them lean on you for emotional support. So I think this tends to happen where the breakup has been more amicable or maybe more mutual, or maybe there are logistical factors that mean you're still in contact or there's been some back and forth and maybe you aren't sure how you're feeling, or they broke up with you and then they came back and all of the things right where it hasn't been a clean break and there's still some mess and entanglement. One of the most confusing things after a breakup is to try and be each other's emotional support system, to try and help each other through the sadness and the grief of the breakup. Because even though you might rationally know that we're not together anymore, continuing to occupy that space of, like, this is the person I go to when I'm feeling vulnerable and in distress, that doesn't allow your attachment system to catch up with reality. That just keeps them occupying that space.
[00:17:05]:
And that means that the process of detaching from them and moving on is going to be a lot more protracted. And ultimately, you're just kicking the can down the road because you're going to have to do that sooner or later. And so you need to support yourself with other people, with friends, with therapists. And if it's the other way that you're supporting them, I know it can be really hard when you feel like, oh, but they don't have anyone. I'm the only person they've ever opened up to. And so I need to be that person for them as much as I know that comes from a good place and it makes sense. And it's really hard to feel like you're kind of abandoning someone in their hour of need. A breakup is ultimately about you, and your first responsibility is supporting yourself rather than supporting them.
[00:17:54]:
And so I think sometimes we do have to trust someone to be resourceful, to seek the support that they need, and to have healthy boundaries in place about what is our responsibility there and what maybe isn't. That doesn't mean being, like, cruel and harsh and uncaring, but I think that we can have care and love for someone while still setting up healthy boundaries that respect what we each need rather than what feels most natural. Because, again, a lot of a breakup is actually recalibrating away from one normal towards another, and so continuing to fulfil that really important role of emotional support person that is likely to really muddy the waters and to make things harder rather than easier, even though it might bring relief in the short term. Okay, I'm going to leave it there. I really hope that that's been helpful. If you're going through a breakup, I'm sending you lots of love because I know how hard it is. Hopefully this episode has shone a light for you on some of the ways that you might be exacerbating the pain and turning the pain into suffering by holding on to things that give you a sense of control that are actually just ways to distract yourself or bypass the pain, which I think so many of us with anxious patterns do. We buzz around in our heads and try and solve the puz rather than sitting with the immense grief that we're actually carrying around, not only losing the relationship, but all of the ways we might have lost ourselves, all of the hopes for the future that are now not going to come to fruition, all of those layers really need to be given our attention and our care.
[00:19:34]:
And the more that we obsess and fixate and compare and ruminate on what's going on over there with them, that is just taking us away from the thing that absolutely needs our love, care, attention, and support, which is us and our own wounded, tender parts that are being activated by the breakup. So, sending you lots of love. I hope this has been helpful, and I look forward to seeing you again next time. Thanks, guys.
Keywords from Podcast Episode
breakups, self-sabotage after a breakup, anxious attachment, relationship patterns, personal growth, grieving process, emotional pain, obsessive rumination, replaying the relationship, attachment wounds, closure after breakup, moving on, healing from breakups, idealising ex-partners, rose-coloured glasses, romanticising relationships, comparing healing, social media and breakups, validation, emotional support systems, setting boundaries post-breakup, breakups and self-awareness, self-focus after breakup, breakup triggers, unhealthy coping mechanisms, internal work after breakup, avoiding pain, using AI for relationship advice, nervous system regulation, relationship endings